Use of computerized systems in the travel and hospitality industries is advantageous both for customers and for suppliers. Computerized reservation systems facilitate storing and retrieving information as well as conducting transactions related to air travel, hotels, car rentals, and other activities. However, conventional systems have some limitations, including limited content, legacy environment, latency, and scalability. Additionally, conventional computerized systems used in the travel and hospitality industries serve limited areas of suppliers operations. Some operations are performed by operators, which makes such operations time-consuming and inefficient.
A computerized reservation system includes several components to manage different transportation areas. An airline inventory can be used to define how many seats are available on a particular flight (e.g. aircrafts, crew, and passenger name records) and is conventionally managed by a legacy inventory system. The legacy inventory system can suffer from several limitations, some of which are direct consequence of its architecture. One of these limitations is the performance of the inventory system and its limited ability to update passenger name records (PNRs) during an increased activity. These limitations can become a serious bottleneck when airline operations are affected by weather conditions, flight delays, flight cancellations, airport shutdowns, and other service disruptions. Delays in passenger re-accommodation and schedule modifications can aggravate the effect of service disruptions. The reason for this is that the legacy inventory system cannot update its inventory at a rate sufficient to handle large number of changes created by a modern system. For example, a modern re-accommodation system creates solutions for passengers at up to 100,000 or more PNR changes in just a few minutes, while the legacy inventory system can process only up to 50,000 transactions an hour. Since these changes cannot be throttled into the legacy inventory system in under an hour, the state of the inventory is unknown until the update process is complete.
Moreover, while the legacy system update is in progress, external requests for inventory can be granted and further degrade the re-accommodation process, thereby resulting in failures for many transactions associated with a re-accommodation solution. Additionally, further solutions may be run against the inventory, the status of which may be unknown. Any solution generated is likely to override the current solution being throttled, thereby introducing further confusion into the system.